People here have started talking about how Democratic leadership has started writing off the presidential race, and are pushing a replacement candidate, not to win, but to try to retake the House and hold the Senate. I don’t know how true this is, as it’s based on the usual “anonymous sources”. However, if it is true, I think it is incredibly short-sighted of them to plan for this.
The reason is a common historical occurrence called a purge. Effectively, those in political power use that power to take out their opposition (including people putatively on their side who had grown too strong) who would otherwise be in a position to stop them, usually by exiling, imprisoning, or executing them.
This is not something that’s happened in America till now, so we have no experience with it, but other countries have had to deal with it plenty of times. Here’s several famous examples the BBC listed:
- Germany, 1934: Adolf Hitler purged his “brownshirts” in what has since been called The Night of the Long Knives.
- Russia, 1934: Josef Stalin used the assassination of his right-hand man, Kirov, as justification for exiling or executing dozens of party leaders starting, with the excuse that they supported Trotsky, who had been previously exiled in 1929.
- Iraq, 1979: Saddam Hussein purged dozens of members of his party when he came to power.
- China, 1980: Den Xiaoping purged four of the most extreme supporters of Mao Zedong, after usurping Mao’s chosen successor Hua Guofeng in 1978.
- Burma, 2004: Than Shwe imprisoned the younger, more charismatic general Khin Nyunt who had started building a power base of his own.
- North Korea, 2013: Kim Jong-un executed his uncle Chang Song-thaek for “attempting to overthrow the state”.
Given the Supreme Injustices on the SCOTUS ruling that the president is effectively immune to criminal prosecution for “official acts”, and how many times convicted felon Donald Trump has talked about locking up his political opposition, I think it is incredibly dangerous to assume that we can restrain him if we lose the Presidency but somehow hold the House and Senate.
That means we have to go all in on winning the presidency. We are in the process of setting ourselves up for defeat whether or not Biden remains the nominee, and we cannot afford that. Too many people will suffer or die if Trump gets back into office for us to not fight with every ounce of our ability to keep him out of it.
That means we need to get public attention off of Biden and back onto Trump. That is actually quite easy to do — we just start talking about Project 2025, or Agenda 47, or corruption on the SCOTUS, or GOP support for a convicted felon, or even how easy it is for someone to get a gun and try to assassinate major political figures.
That holds true regardless of what you think of Biden as a candidate. If you’re tempted to write your own article outlining the reasons you think he needs to go, or the reasons you think he needs to stay in for that matter, please reconsider and write about Trump and his Republicans instead. It will do us all much more good to see regular reminders of our common, shared purpose of ensuring that Trump does not win than to see regular reminders of our inability to agree on Biden’s viability as a candidate. The former empowers us to do something about it; the latter paralyzes us with ceaseless arguments that go nowhere.